Skills For The 21st Century - Alexander Cortes - #057

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back. This week, my guest is Alexander Cortes. He's a personal trainer, a writer and a speaker, and he's a pretty interesting guy. I didn't have an agenda going into this conversation. I just wanted to talk to him about whatever was on his mind, and we ended up discussing strategies for success in the 21st century, what skills and knowledge he would give to an 18 year old human being, if he was going to design one right now and send it out into the world. Then we moved on to the Fyre Festival documentary, which both of us absolutely fell in love with when we watched it. If you haven't seen it yet, I urge you to go onto Netflix and give it a watch. But we had a look into that and derived some really interesting conclusions about how seduced society is with success and the potential for Billy McFarlane, the guy behind Fyre Festival, to have Gary vaynerchuk pressing on his amygdala throughout the entirety of his life. So if you want to find out what that means, continue listening and as always, if you are new here, please press subscribe. If you are a regular and you haven't done already, press five stars wherever you are listening. It would make me very happy indeed. And it helps support the podcast. Now please welcome Alexander Cortes.
Alex, how are you today? Welcome to Modern Wisdom.

**Alexander Cortes** (1:34)
I'm very good. How about yourself, my man?

**Chris Williamson** (1:35)
Yeah, I'm fantastic, thanks. It looks an awful lot nicer wherever you are. I can see there's a reflection of some good sunlight outside, which we haven't seen in the UK for a long time.

**Alexander Cortes** (1:47)
I live right in the beach in Venice, so I'm in a pretty opportune spot for weather.

**Chris Williamson** (1:51)
Oh man, that is jealousy-inducing, to say the least. So we haven't got an agenda to today. We're just going to talk about whatever's on our minds. So what have you been learning about, or reading about, or thinking about recently?

**Alexander Cortes** (2:07)
Recently, so I got a few things I'm working on. I don't have any real structure to my day at all. I mean, like I do, but I don't. I basically just write an email every day, and then tweet a lot, and then just talk about stuff. So it's sort of like this personal brand influencer, strange position, that you can't really qualify what you do, yet people pay attention to you all the time. But I mean, the big project I'm actually working on right now that's been constructive is I developed an online website learning portal with a business partner of mine called Sovereign University to teach people how to become sovereign individuals within like the modern sort of digital virtual economy, physical world as they've merged with each other. You know, myself, I've been working online for myself about going on three years, and before that I'd worked with other people. And I've also been a personal trainer for 10 years, training people in person. But I always found myself attracted to sort of this political conflict. I like knowing what's going on, in the sense of like on a meta level, not just on the level of petty politics. But it's been fascinating to me the last six, seven years to watch the dialogue and discourse devolve into this politicized rhetoric where everything's political and everything you say can and will be used against you. And you see people lose their jobs or what they said, you see people go under fire for every kind of comment. Everything is taken out of context but into a different context. And I realized for someone like myself, because I've gone through that myself and I know what the consequences are, three years ago I wanted to be in a position where I never had to worry about backlash of any kind. I didn't want to have to worry about an online mob. I did not want to have to worry about being doxed. I wanted to be immune to all that. And I realized if you work for yourself, if you're a sovereign individual in the sense that you are self-made, self-paid, self-employed, you own your own businesses, and especially in the digital world where things really can't be taken from you that way, and then you have fiscal basis, you're very untouchable in a certain sensibility. So sovereign universities are built around that concept, but then it's also teaching people the fundamental skills they need and the mindsets to learn how to do this stuff and create high-value skills and create leverage. So it's an ambitious project.